So basically, if AOS was released as an Open Source project, no one has given a clear idea as to where they want it to go. AROS is not AOS but that seems like everyone's easy answer.
Put the key in the door and retire this thread.
If I recall correctly, one of the biggest omissions of AmigaOS is memory protection, or lack thereof. If I recall, even AmigaOS 4 doesn't have it? Or maybe it was only recently added.
AROS is a good example of where it would go, simply for the multi-platform support. Amiga everywhere was what one.. *cough* person *cough* kept touting as the next awesome thing. If they had just released the code, we'd probably have that already, and AROS wouldn't need to reverse engineer all of the functions.
I think 4.x is going in the direction that it would have gone, though I really think it's only being able to run on very select hardware is what is killing it's popularity. We all know what made the Amiga awesome in the first place is the custom chipset, but custom chips aren't really viable anymore, simply because the CPU can provide so much raw power, not to mention the graphics chips. Oddly though the sound chips still pretty much suck.
I always kind of figured that if the hardware had improved and Commodore hadn't gone bust, we'd have something similar to the way the Atari Jaguar was set up. Custom Graphics and Sound chips with a 68000 for bootloading the whole thing. Would keep the software that is already written working, but give a nice fat bus speed for everything that is coded for the new hardware. Make the hardware fresh enough and fast enough that you wouldn't need to get any upgrades for 5 or so years. I think the biggest problem with PCs these days are sloppy coding and the constant upgrade path. Sure it's slowed down in recent years, but the fact that newer software takes so much more memory and so much more processing speed, but doesn't have much better graphics / sound is disturbing.
That's where the AmigaOS shines. The OS itself is so lightweight and yet versatile, that really what it needs is bug fixes. Maybe add a few APIs to be native, like SDL, OpenGL, OpenAL, etc. Upgrade the languages to the latest (Perl, Python, C++11, etc) and make it easier to write software for, and a reason to write software for it. If programmers can look at how things were written to so tightly use the hardware, maybe it'll give them inspiration to make their software not require 8gb of RAM!
For what it's worth, today I told my manager that some computer was running at 99.9% CPU usage and was crawling because of some java software that is simply supposed to do something like FTP files. I made the comment, "He needs to write his software for computers that are made today, not 20 years from now." I have already gone blue in the face from them re-writing something as simple as transferring files in Java, and using UDP... but that's a bit off topic...
The Amiga is from an age when computers were fun, and not everyone knew how to 'use' them. When if you had a computer, you were most likely picked on as a geek. That's part of where the nostalgia comes in, but it could potentially bring more people back into the fold if the source code were available, and we could all learn from it as well.
But I would vote for bug fixes before features! Which I think is the way that most of the new libraries are going. Getting PeterK's icon.library installed really does improve the overall experience of the Amiga! I really need to look at the other ones!
slaapliedje
